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A statement about the tragic death of Henrique Souza Pereira in Fibria’s eucalyptus plantations from Sócio-Environmental Fórum of the Extreme South of Bahia and the Alert against the Green Desert Network (March 23, 2010).

With this statement, we express our enormous outrage about the death of 24-years old Henrique Souza Pereira, who was killed on 16 March 2010. According to Fibria´s press release (Fibria is the former Aracruz Celulose and partner of Stora Enso in the Veracel Celulose company), a team of GARRA, the private ‘security’ company of Fibria, shot Henrique, alleging that he was stealing wood and ‘acting aggressively’ when he was requested to leave an area with eucalyptus trees. But the father of Henrique, Osvaldo Pereira Bezerra declared in an interview with a local newspaper, he was accompanying Henrique on a motorcycle going home when the conflict happened. During the incident, the security force broke the arm of Henrique’s father.

Tomorrow, 29 April 2009, the Wilderness Society will run this full-page advertisement in the Financial Times. The Wilderness Society has released a list of the banks which have committed not to finance Gunns’ proposed pulp mill in Tasmania. The following four banks have not yet ruled out financing the pulp mill and are named in the advertisement:

Aracruz has announced that it is to “temporarily suspend” the construction of its new pulp mill in Guaiba, Rio Grande do Sul province. Construction at the proposed new 1.3 million tons per year pulp mill started in August 2008 and the planned start of operations was 2010.

In August 2008, Via Campesina Brazil and the Movement of Landless Peasants (MST) launched an international campaign against the activities of the Swedish-Finnish pulp and paper company Stora Enso. Via Campesina Brazil is asking people to write to the governments of Sweden and Finland and to the head office of Stora Enso, to protest against the company’s operations in Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. The letter is below. Representatives of Via Campesina and MST will visit the Finnish and Swedish embassies in Brazil this week, to deliver the letter.

A network of more than 50 European environmental non-governmental organisations today launches “Shrink”, a joint project addressing the madness of over-consumption of paper. Individuals as well as corporate and institutional paper users are invited to pledge to cut their paper consumption, on the new website www.shrinkpaper.org.

On Tuesday, 4th March 2008, about 900 women from the International Peasant Movement Via Campesina were violently evicted by the Military Police from an area of 2,100 hectares of Stora Enso’s plantations at the Tarumã Farm in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. According to a statement from Via Campesina about 60 women were badly injured and 800 were arrested. The Military Police used rubber bullets during the eviction. 250 children at the camp were separated from their parents. Tents were destroyed and tools taken from the women.

This Tuesday, 4 March, around 900 women of the Via Campesina occupied the Tarumã Farm, 2,100 hectares big, in the municipality of Rosário do Sul, at about 400 km from the state capital Porto Alegre. They arrived at the area at about 6 am and started immediately to cut down eucalyptus trees and to plant native trees seedlings. In a press release, the women declare that:

“Our action is legitimate. It is Stora Enso that is acting illegally. Planting this green desert in the border region is a crime against the legislation of our country, against the ‘pampa’ (type of grassland) biome and against the food sovereignty of our state that stays with every time less land to produce food crops. We are cutting what is bad and planting what is good for the environment and for the people of Rio Grande do Sul”.

A major investment group has labeled Gunns as high risk and recommended investors sell Gunns shares due to blowouts in cost and timing for the pulp mill project and the rising Australian dollar. Considering the Citigroup report, The Wilderness Society is calling on Gunns banker the ANZ to reconsider its position on the project and refuse involvement before investors, shareholders and customers savings are damaged by financing the highly risky pulp mill.

A recent article by Barnaby Drake in the World Rainforest Movement Bulletin outlines some of the subsidies that Gunns receives from the government.

One of these comes in the form of Managed Investment Services Companies. These companies invest in monoculture tree plantations and the government grants them tax-free status – on the grounds that the plantations are a carbon sink and carbon credits can be traded against continuing pollution. Apart from the sheer impossibility of proving that plantations are actually sinks (see, for example, Carbon Offsets and the Ghost of Frank Knight, in the Cornerhouse’s 2006 report “Carbon Trading“, page 160), the plantations will be cut down, chipped, converted to pulp, exported to Japan, China or wherever and converted to paper. Producing paper consumes huge amounts of energy. Globally, the pulp and paper industry is the fifth largest consumer of energy. Most paper ends up ultimately in landfills where it decomposes and produces methane – a far stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.